Results by title

By shifting the study of sexuality to focus on “sexual aim,” we can understand the birth of the sexual subject—the historical emergence of an understanding of sexuality as an aspect of personhood.

Is it possible that half of the organization of modern sexuality has been forgotten? Historians of sexuality have thought about sexual desire almost exclusively in terms of the sexual object—the person to whom one is attracted. This book offers a history and theory of “sexual aim”—the what and how of desire—arguing that aim furnishes a constitutive and almost wholly ignored governing logic of sexuality. 

The term “sexual aim” was coined by Sigmund Freud to describe “modes of gratification”—the sexual acts in which one finds pleasure, from kissing and copulation to voyeurism and fetishism. Benjamin Kahan repurposes this account to tell the complex story of how sexual aim catalyzed the formation of modern sexual identity and continues to operate as a powerful optic for understanding Euro-American sexualities.

Kahan focuses on nonnormative sexual aims, examining the histories of sadism, masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and fetishism in order to articulate the relationship between sexual acts and sexuality. Drawing on diaries, court records, erotica, literary texts, marriage manuals, and medical treatises, Kahan vividly maps the emergence of the sexual subject from the early modern period through the twentieth century to furnish a new account of sexual modernity.

Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the "singly blessed" women and "bachelor girls" of the 19th and early 20th century and "all the single ladies" of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.